The Great American Pin-Up


Charles G. Martignette - 1996
    It describes the genre's origins and development, showcasing the most important artists.

Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly


Joshua Rivkin - 2018
    Twombly carefully managed his own image, writing almost nothing about his life and work, and giving only a handful of interviews. Through years of scholarship and archival research, first-person interviews, and a sensitive eye to Twombly's art, Joshua Rivkin--who received a Fulbright grant to pursue this story--separates the myth from the reality to bring to life a more complicated and fascinating Twombly than we've ever known.

20 Years of Tomb Raider: Digging Up the Past, Defining the Future


Meagan Marie - 2016
    Rediscover Lara Croft's greatest moments with fascinating coverage of the smash hit Tomb Raider movies, fiction, comics, and collectibles, and be enthralled by the legacy of Tomb Raider across the decades.Packed with exclusive art, photographs, and interviews covering all facets of the Tomb Raider franchise, 20 Years of Tomb Raider is the essential guide to this game's action-packed history and a must-have for every Tomb Raider fan.

Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces


Bruce Willen - 2009
    These fundamentals of design, once the exclusive domain of professional typographers, have become an essential starting point for anyone looking for a fresh way to communicate. Practical information about creating letters and type often amounts to a series of guidelines for executing a particular process, font program, or style. But what makes lettering and type endlessly fascinating is the flexibility to interpret and sometimes even break these rules. Lettering & Type is a smart-but- not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one's will. More than just another pretty survey, it is a powerful how-to book full of relevant theory, history, explanatory diagrams, and exercises. While other type design books get hung up on the technical and technological issues of type design and lettering, Lettering & Type features the context and creativity that shape letters and make them interesting. Authors and designers Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals examine classic design examples as well as exciting contemporary lettering of all stripes—from editorial illustrations to concert posters to radical conceptual alphabets. Lettering & Type is ideal for anyone looking to move beyond existing typography and fonts to create, explore, and use original or customized letterforms. This latest addition to our best-selling Design Briefs seriesfeatures a foreword by Ellen Lupton and hundreds of images and examples of work by historical and contemporary designers, artists, and illustrators, including Marian Bantjes, Stefan Sagmeister, Matthew Carter, Christoph Niemann, Steve Powers (ESPO), House Industries, Christian Schwartz, Margaret Kilgallen, James Victore, Abbott Miller, Sibylle Hagmann, Ed Fella, and many more. Throughout the book interviews with type designers, artists, and graphic designers provide real-world perspective from contemporary practitioners.

Photographing the World Around You: A Visual Design Workshop


Freeman Patterson - 1994
    PHOTOGRAPHING THE WORLD AROUND YOU, is about learning to see and about using your camera to record and interpret what you see where ever you are.

Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation


E.H. Gombrich - 1960
    It seeks to answer a simple question: why is there such a thing as style? The question may be simple but there is no easy answer, and Professor Gombrich's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration of the history and psychology of pictorial representation leads him into countless crucial areas. Gombrich examines, questions and re-evaluates old and new ideas on such matters as the imitation of nature, the function of tradition, the problem of abstraction, the validity of perspective and the interpretation of expression: all of which reveal that pictorial representation is far from being a straightforward matter. First published more than 40 years ago, Art and Illusion has lost none of its vitality and importance. In applying the findings of experimental science to a nuanced understanding of art and in tackling complex ideas and theoretical issues, Gombrich is rigorous.Yet he always retains a sense of wonder at the inexhaustible capacity of the human brain, and at the subtlety of the relationships involved in seeing the world and in making and seeing art. With profound knowledge and his exceptional gift for clear exposition, he advances each argument as an hypothesis to be tested. The problems of representation are forever fundamental to the history of art: Art and Illusion remains an essential text for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of art. For the sixth edition Professor Gombrich has written an entirely new 12-page preface, in which he makes use of the distinction between an image and a sign, so as to clarify his intentions in writing the book in the first place.

Painting People: Figure Painting Today


Charlotte Mullins - 2006
    A new generation of artists--as well as some who never abandoned figurative painting in the first place--is relishing the solitary, slow, subtle set of processes involved in not just painting, but painting people. They are choosing paint's unique ability to distill a lifetime of events rather than photography's glimpse of a frozen moment. Painting People, edited by the prominent London art historian and critic Charlotte Mullins, unites and contrasts the work of a key group of artists from around the world, and investigates their richly varied accomplishments in lucid text with detailed commentaries, accompanied by more than 150 reproductions. The list of contributing artists is stellar, ranging from photo-based painters like Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas to Pop artists like Sigmar Polke and Alex Katz, photorealists like Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter, Neoexpressionists like Cecily Brown, and comics-inspired painters like Yoshitomo Nara, Inka Essenhigh and Takashi Murakami. There are erotic grotesques from John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage, meditations on the muse by Elizabeth Peyton and Lucian Freud, "Repro-realistic" work from Neo Rauch and of course self-portraits by Philip Akkerman and Marcel Dzama, among others.

The Book of Tiki


Sven A. Kirsten - 2000
    Americans seized these visions and incorporated fantasy into reality: mid-century fashion, popular music, eating and drinking, and even architecture were influenced by the Tiki trend. This enlightening and hilarious guide casts the reader as an ""urban archaeologist,"" exploring the lost remnants of the Tiki culture across the United States and discovering relics from this forgotten civilization in thrift stores, yard sales, and used book and record emporia. A combination of nostalgia and fascinating pop cultural study, this volume is a long overdue investigation into the cult of the Tiki. Almost makes you want to dig up those old grass skirts and throw luau

The Golden Age of DC Comics


Paul Levitz - 2011
    He was not the first super hero, but the Man of Steel would become the prototype for all super heroes thereafter. Superman's story, and those of Batman, Wonder Woman, and hundreds of other DC Comics characters, are all told in The Golden Age of DC Comics . The single most comprehensive book on the subject, this volume traces the company's first decades, from its pulp origins up to the comic book burnings of the McCarthy ’50s in more than 400 pages bursting with comics, art, comics, photographs, and more comics. Also included is an exclusive interview with legendary artist Joe Kubert! About the series: TASCHEN's series on DC Comics explores the origins of comics’ most enduring legends and the behind-the-scenes stories of the men and women who created them, era by era. Expanded from the Eisner Award–winning XL book, 75 Years of DC Comics, this new series hits the shelf at a reader-friendly size with essays updated by author Paul Levitz and more than 1,000 new images across five volumes. Thousands of covers and interiors, original illustrations, photographs, film stills, and collectibles have been reproduced to bring the story lines, the characters, and their creators to vibrant life, making this an invaluable reference for comics fans.DC Comics characters and all related elements are trademarks of and © DC Comics. (s13)

Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art with Wax


Lissa Rankin - 2010
    Today, museums are staging exhibitions of encaustic art, workshops in the technique are thriving, and art collectors and dealers are assimilating encaustic art into their collections and galleries. The word encaustic is taken from the Greek and means “to burn in.” In the encaustic process, pigmented wax is applied and then fused to a surface with heat. The result is a broad range of surface effects and a luminous translucency that is unique to the encaustic medium. Encaustic Art is a complete resource for artists who wish to learn to create fine art with wax. It features step-by-step techniques with easy-to-understand instructions and detailed illustrations, stunning examples of encaustic works of art (including sculpture), along with practical advice and thoughtful aesthetic observations from more than 60 professional artists working in the encaustic medium.

Bauhaus


Magdalena Droste - 2006
    With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed apioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technologyto be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded byWalter Gropius (1883 1969), and countedJosef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stolzl, Marianne BrandtandLudwig Mies van der Roheamong its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fosteredcharistmatic and creative exchangebetween teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a total work of art across different practices and media.This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as atrailblazer in the development of modernism, and as aparadigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Architecture Series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans) "

A World of Art


Henry M. Sayre - 1994
    College level text for art appreciation.

The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern


Carol Strickland - 1992
    A layman's guide to art history provides the reader with a basic working knowledge of art and its influence on society.

The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form


Kenneth Clark - 1956
    From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.

The Pre-Raphaelites


Timothy Hilton - 1971
    Surveys the origins, development, techniques, approaches, principles, motifs, and major paintings of the nineteenth-century British school, relating the painters and their works to their society.